A few days ago, the State Food and Drug Administration publicly solicited opinions on the "Administrative Measures for the Filing of Medical Representatives (Trial)" (hereinafter referred to as the Filing Measures), and the practice norms of medical representatives once again attracted the attention of the industry.

The filing method clarifies the practice norms of medical representatives, that is, medical representatives engaged in drug information transmission, communication, and feedback. Their main responsibilities include: academic promotion, technical consultation, assistance in rational drug use, and collection and feedback of drug adverse reaction information. It should be said that as a relatively professional profession, medical representatives have played a due role in promoting the development of the pharmaceutical industry for a long time. At the same time, there has also been a phenomenon of uneven professional quality of practitioners.

In fact, the professional academic promotion activities carried out by medical representatives are also a common practice in the world for communication between pharmaceutical companies and medical institutions. A new drug and its attached new treatment theory can be rapidly popularized in clinical practice through the dissemination of medical representatives, so that new drugs or new diagnosis and treatment technologies will eventually benefit patients. Therefore, standardized medical representative behavior not only contributes to the clinical application of new technologies, but also has an outstanding contribution to improving medical standards and patient satisfaction.

The filing method specifies the academic promotion activities that medical representatives can carry out, including face-to-face and online communication, holding academic conferences and lectures, providing academic research materials, and other forms agreed by medical institutions. It also lists the activities that should not be carried out: undertaking drug sales tasks, counting the number of prescriptions issued by individual doctors, directly providing donations and subsidies to departments and individuals in medical institutions, misleading doctors to use drugs, concealment of known adverse drug reaction information and other illegal acts. The filing method clarifies what medical representatives can and cannot do, and aims to guide the industry to develop in the right direction of standardizing and benefiting the health of the people.

The filing method also supervises the transformation of the marketing model from sales to promotion, which has been lingering on for many years. The sales model of simple customer sentiment will gradually be replaced by professional academic promotion. This transformation process is inseparable from the pre-job training of medical representatives, which also raises the entry threshold of medical representatives, because professional medicine and product knowledge training need to have a certain professional foundation.

In the process of marketing transformation of pharmaceutical enterprises, the new customer relationship system based on the Internet provides a new development direction for pharmaceutical enterprises. When the efficiency of face-to-face communication is low, especially when such communication is also affected by objective factors such as epidemic situation, the new communication network is very precious. The new digital service system for doctors and patients speeds up the circulation of medical information, makes it more convenient for doctors to manage patients, carry out personalized patient education, medication reminder, health consultation, etc., and also enables patients to better follow doctor's advice and get timely rehabilitation guidance.

With the advent of the 5G era, pharmaceutical companies can hand over more repetitive communication work to the Internet, allowing digital patient education knowledge base to complete communication. On the other hand, the digital doctor-patient service system under big data will become the next marketing hot spot. With the emergence of digital medical representatives, medical representatives will engage in irreplaceable creative work.

The author believes that the management of the medical representative filing system has just begun, and more professional and creative work is waiting for the rapid development of this industry. Medical representatives will also transform from "selling products" to "providing services", and new planned offline services. And online digital promotion will be the general trend. Medical representatives, are you ready?